leece<p>We're getting toward the end of National Science Week in Australia, so I polished this up for you.</p><p>It was a result of multiple sessions and stacking in my <a href="https://aus.social/tags/DwarfLab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DwarfLab</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/SmartTelescope" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SmartTelescope</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Dwarf3" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Dwarf3</span></a> </p><p>It's a nice subject and one I think I'll revist.</p><p><a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astrodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astrodon</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/SouthernHemisphereAstronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SouthernHemisphereAstronomy</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Nebula" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Nebula</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astronomy</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/BackyardAstrophotography" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>BackyardAstrophotography</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/DrivewayAstronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DrivewayAstronomy</span></a></p>
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#dwarflab
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rdm<p>Over the last three nights - a break in the weather for us here in <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Boorloo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Boorloo</span></a> ( <a href="https://aus.social/tags/PerthWA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>PerthWA</span></a> ) - I've been targeting the same target after midnight and through to astronomical twilight. It is another target that is familiar to me - <a href="https://aus.social/tags/C63" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>C63</span></a> or <a href="https://aus.social/tags/HelixNebula" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>HelixNebula</span></a> sometimes known as the Eye of Sauron Nebula or the Eye of God Nebula. </p><p>This is the largest planetary nebula visible to us, only about 200 parsecs away, and is about 2.8 light years across, making it about 22 arcminutes across for the main body, and is about 6500 years old. </p><p>So back to the making of this image. Each night I got about five hours of shooting in with my <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Dwarf3" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Dwarf3</span></a> , for about fifteen hours total. I had to ditch a bunch of frames as they had dodgy data (atmospheric distortions, musktrails, and, in one case, a passing jet), which brought me down to thirteen hours and thirty-six minutes (816x60s@80). These I restacked using the "Megastack" function of the <a href="https://aus.social/tags/DwarfLab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DwarfLab</span></a> app (about 3 hours - executed entirely within the telescope), and then passed the result to the <a href="https://aus.social/tags/StellarStudio" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>StellarStudio</span></a> part of the app (running in the cloud) to optimize the FITS file and run a star removal.</p><p>I then exported a PNG of each version, and started post-processing. This consisted of passing the starless image into <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Snapseed" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Snapseed</span></a> and boosting the saturation, darkening shadows and so on. Then I took the optimized version and took the shadows to maximum darkness, and reduced the overall brightness somewhat, leaving me with a reduced star version, with almost no nebula visible. Lastly, in Snapseed again, I used the double exposure tool to stack the two parts together. </p><p>And here is the result. </p><p><a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astronomy</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astrodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astrodon</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astrophotography" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astrophotography</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/C63" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>C63</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/HelixNebula" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>HelixNebula</span></a></p>
leece<p>Last night's effort, with some <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Snapseed" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Snapseed</span></a> and Google photos editing with advice from <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://aus.social/@rdm" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>rdm</span></a></span> for OCl 999.0 with Prawn Nebula.</p><p><a href="https://aus.social/tags/SmartTelescope" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SmartTelescope</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astrodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astrodon</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astronomy</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astrophotography" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astrophotography</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/DwarfIII" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DwarfIII</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Dwarf3" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Dwarf3</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/DwarfLab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DwarfLab</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/SouthernHemisphereAstronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SouthernHemisphereAstronomy</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/DrivewayAstrophotography" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DrivewayAstrophotography</span></a></p>
leece<p>Hello everybody and I hope you’ve been getting some clear skies for your telescoping if you’re into it. If you’re not into it, that’s cool, this may not be of interest to you. </p><p>It’s clagged over for me, but before it did, I was very busy with the sky indeed. Let me take you on a journey - the journey of the Leece’s ClusterFudge.</p><p>People who are familiar with my astronomy writings may remember that once I had a telescope of the smart persuasion I found I liked hunting Nebulae.</p><p>I thought they were beautiful and cool and interesting, and really gave one the impression of 3 dimensionality in the night sky, that space was indeed filled with vast depths. </p><p>Clusters, I said, especially Globular Clusters were not very interesting. They all look the same, I said, and they’re not really going to be on my dance card.</p><p>So I set my Dwarf II and Dwarf III for long periods to capture all sorts of nebulae and was happy over the course of a year and a half, during which time we volunteered at the Perth Astrofest and showed thousands of people how cool smart telescopes were, and I won an astrophotography prize.</p><p>We got Covid 19 and got great comfort from being able to put our telescopes out by barely leaving our recovery room, and watching the images build. I found by accident while chasing nebulae that some open clusters were quite interesting and beautiful, although nebulae were still where it was at for me.</p><p>We visited the Gravity Discovery Centre for one of their Astronomy Nights, and listened to the Chief Astronomer talk about globular clusters, and how some people thought that they all looked the same. </p><p>Yep that’s me I thought, but I listened and his enthusiasm touched me. Hmm, yes okay I thought, maybe I’ll take a look. Great tour, by the way, recommended. </p><p>So I had a look, and something started ticking away in my mind thoughtfully. These clusters sure are bright I thought. I bet they don’t need much time. Maybe if I lined up a lot of Globular Clusters next to each other, I could see the differences and develop an appreciation of them. </p><p>It might be fun to see just how many clusters I can take in a period of darkness. I’ll have to fudge together a schedule. And thus the inception of the LCF Catalogue- the Leece’s ClusterFudge Catalogue.</p><p> I started testing as to what the shortest period my telescopes could be set for during a scheduled shoot. </p><p><a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astrodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astrodon</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astronomy</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/SouthernHemisphereAstronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SouthernHemisphereAstronomy</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astrophotography" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astrophotography</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/DwarfLab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DwarfLab</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Dwarf2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Dwarf2</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Dwarf3" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Dwarf3</span></a></p>
rdm<p>So a couple of days ago <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Dwarflab" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Dwarflab</span></a> dropped a new update for the <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Dwarf3" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Dwarf3</span></a>. This one added the ability to shoot a 2x2 (well 1.8x1.8 allowing for overlap) mosaic in Astro mode.</p><p>This comes with a bunch of limitations - you must be in equatorial mode, and you are limited to 15s @ gain 60. You can specify how many stacks, and you can combine sessions, so it is not all bad news. </p><p>Last night I tried it out on the reflection nebula region around Rho Ophiuchus. In these shots we have: <br>IC4603/4604/4605 NGC6093 (M80) and some more significant stars.</p><p>The results are interesting. Dwarf still have a little bit of work to do on equalising the exposures, but this region is particularly challenging in that respect. Post processing tends to bring out these issues, and I'm sure that manually processing the subs in Siril would completely remove them.</p><p>The new update also includes a watermarking feature, which is neat, but could stand to have the RA/Dec data included.</p><p>All-in-all a really useful update!</p><p><a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astrophotography" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astrophotography</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astrodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astrodon</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Astronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Astronomy</span></a> <a href="https://aus.social/tags/BackyardAstronomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>BackyardAstronomy</span></a></p>
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